What does that shirt mean to you? Thrift-store consumption as cultural capital

Abstract

Recent work shows cultural capital taking increasingly vague and embodied forms. Attitudes and understandings of “creativity” and “authenticity,” for example, hold more symbolic value than any particular objects. How are these culturally valuable understandings defined and transmitted? This project examines thrift-store shopping to show how symbolic meanings are defined and employed as a form of embodied cultural capital. Ethnographic observation and interviews with shoppers at thrift stores in Portland, Oregon, reveal competing symbolic understandings among two groups of consumers. One group, the “thrift-seekers,” is motivated by a desire to find bargains. Members of this group describe their consumption as a game in which they are able to compete with other consumers. The other group, the “creativists,” comes from a more privileged background and is motivated by a rejection of conventional stores. They describe their consumption as an exercise of creativity through which they establish superiority over other consumers. Each group implicates the other as it constructs its narrative of consumption. Outside of the thrift store, the creativists employ their narratives of creativity as a form of cultural capital, giving them status in relation to similarly privileged peers. This project illustrates the embodied nature of contemporary cultural capital and shows how classes implicate one another in definitions of it. Furthermore, it demonstrates how thrift stores hold particular significance as sites in which embodied cultural capital is defined.

Experiential Value in Group Browsing of Curios on eBay and In-Person: Implications for Future Platform Design

“…It's further cited reported there are 3 core experiential motivations for shopping for second hand goods; social contact, stimulation, and treasure hunting aspects. Other work [6,34,70,72] concurs, citing the searching and browsing are key. However, it is suggested there is a division between 'hunters' and 'browsers' with the former searching for particular items they want, and browsers more focused on what potential unknown treasure they may encounter [26].…”

“…This is cited as a lateral cycling process, where items retain their purpose and form simply with a new owner, as opposed to recycling there the purpose or form factor of an item is altered for its future iteration [36]. It has been shown that whilst some buyers are reported as defensive about their practice of buying second hand, in certain contexts such as thrift stores there is social capital accrued from clothing items which has been sourced in this manner [8,72]. Approaches to selling are equally diverse, with professional, semiprofessional and occasional sellers.…”

Meanings and attitudes regarding education and household spending priorities of the new middle-class families in Brazil

“…Scholars have reported mechanisms of distinction as diverse as the exercise of creativity (Steward, 2017), green consumption (Carfagna et al., 2014), and voluntary simplicity (Walther and Sandling, 2013). Furthermore, since studies on NMC consumers in Brazil have found a strong impetus for social differentiation among peers (Castilhos and Rossi, 2009; Rocha et al., 2016), education can very well be a way for standing out within a population that has just recently gained access to middle-class goods and services.…”

Free repair against the consumer society: How repair cafés socialize people to a new relationship to objects

“…Repair Cafés can speak to different populations because there are many different reasons for going there. They can be compared to secondhand shops, whose meanings depend on the audience (Bardhi and Arnould, 2005), gathering the less well-off “thrift seekers,” and the wealthy “creativists” who make secondhand purchases a form of cultural capital (Steward, 2017). However, we will see that this distinction between subjugated and voluntary sobriety does not have a strong explanatory potential to demonstrate the variety of Repair Cafés’ impacts on audiences.

Figure 1.Motivations to come and repair one’s object in Repair Café according to socio-professional category.

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